A three-judge bench headed by the top judge resumed hearing into the money laundering of Rs35 billion from fictitious bank accounts.

During the hearing, Federal Investigation Agency (FIA) Director General Bashir Memon recorded his statement and said the agency recently conducted a raid at Omni Group’s Karachi office.

“We found documents related to Kam Crown International Trading House Company in Dubai during the raid,” the DG FIA said.

The FIA official continued that based on those documents, another raid was conducted at the Dubai office where numerous records of foreign currency accounts were found.

Memon informed the bench that the records of accounts found from the Dubai office belonged to the family of Omni Group chairman Anwar Majeed and the transfers in the accounts were made by the same people as those indicated in the account details found earlier.

“From Dubai, money was sent to England and France,” he said and added that the investigative agency also seized several hard drives containing a massive amount of data.

Upon this, Justice Ijazul Ahsan questioned if FIA has people who can check the data? The DG FIA then responded that the cyber crime wing was working on it but there was a lot of data to be scrutinized.

The chief justice then remarked that a joint investigation team (JIT) should be constituted to probe this matter. The court also directed that the team would submit a report on the matter every 15 days.

On Tuesday, a banking court extended the interim bail of former president and Pakistan Peoples Party (PPP) leader Asif Ali Zardari and his sister Faryal Talpur in a money laundering case.

The former president was granted 15-day interim bail by the banking court on August 31.

On August 17, a banking court had issued non-bailable arrest warrants for Zardari and other absconding suspects in the ongoing investigation.

The Islamabad High Court (IHC) on August 18 had approved the protective bail on the petition filed by the former president in the case and ordered him to appear before the relevant court before September 3.

This is pertinent to mention that the Federal Investigation Agency (FIA) is investigating 32 people, including Asif Ali Zardari and his sister Faryal Talpur in connection with money laundering from fake accounts.

Zardari’s close aide Hussain Lawai was arrested in July in connection with the probe.